PDF: 2962 pages, 5.2 MB - Bay Area Council Economic Institute

Global Reach
ditches and railroad tracks, and on river banks. Using figures from the last 10-year census, minister
for housing and urban poverty alleviation Kumari Selja reported in 2007 that the number of
Indians living in slums more than doubled from 27.9 million in 1981 to 61.8 million in 2001. The
trend has accelerated as rural/urban income disparities have widened and construction of affordable
public housing has not kept pace with migration.
About 55% of Mumbai’s population—some 11 million people—are slum dwellers, compared to
40% in Chennai and as many as 70% in Delhi. Mumbai is home to one of Asia’s largest slums,
Dharavi, where nearly 1 million people with their own informal economy and property market,
inhabit one square mile. Another 300,000 occupy lands outside the city that are part of the city’s
airport. Significantly, these communities survive with communal water taps, public toilets and
pirated electricity, and they pay no taxes. The government collects 100 rupees a month per
hutment in rent, as a way of halting extortion of rents by criminal gangs.
Dharavi sits dead center in Mumbai, served by two railway lines and directly across a stretch of
mangrove swamp from the 370-hectare Bandhra-Kurla commercial complex, with 12 million
square feet of office and tech park space.
Relocation Strategies
Municipalities, states, and the central government have responded with alternating and often
conflicting clearance, improvement, and relocation strategies. A 1981 eviction of Mumbai
“pavement dwellers”—beggars, street vendors, cycle-rickshaw drivers and laborers living in
sidewalk shanties—prompted the landmark Olga Tellis case, ending in a 1986 court ruling that
the constitutional right to life included the right to a livelihood, and that the pavement dwellers
chose to live where they did to be close to work, so that forcing them to move would deprive
them of their livelihoods. The court ordered that they could not be moved without being provided
with alternative accommodation.
More recently, as Indian cities have become more affluent, environmental protection and tourism
promotion have emerged as competing priorities. In 2000, after a five-year court battle initiated by
an environmental group to protect wildlife in the Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Mumbai, the city
bulldozed 73,000 squatters’ shacks on the park periphery in a mass eviction resulting in four deaths.
Today, some 69,000 families occupying government land in Chennai and 75,000 camped along the
banks of the Yamuna River—the largest tributary to the Ganges and one of the world’s most
polluted rivers, where Delhi dumps 57% of its waste—are targeted for relocation.
In May 2008, the 33-story, 202-room, five-star Four Seasons Hotel opened in South Mumbai—
the first such hotel to go up in South Mumbai in 20 years - a reflection of the scarcity and cost of
hotel rooms of any kind throughout India. The Four Seasons opening concluded a seven-year
planning and construction process requiring 165 permits and relocation of slum dwellers who
had previously occupied the property. The remainder of the slum remains in place nearby. The
hotel ended up costing $100 million to build (about $500,000 per room), but is seen as a model
for future redevelopment of Dharavi and the airport slum. Bangalore, meanwhile, has plans to
replace 542 slum areas with multi-unit housing through a combination of state money and special
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